


Chaos Dances

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Family, Gen, Mental Illness, Teenage Rebellion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-30
Updated: 2010-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-10 08:04:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/97482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wants to shave her head like Natalie Portman in <em>V for Vendetta</em>. She doesn't understand why that means she must be going mad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chaos Dances

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Awesome Ladies Ficathon (lj version)](http://ineffort.livejournal.com/199061.html) to this prompt: Molly Ziegler or any Bartlet daughter, _sometimes the truth is like a second chance / I am the daughter of a great romance_.
> 
> I should probably further disclaim that _I_ don't even know what this one is about. Nevertheless, I loved writing it.

What she remembers is that she wanted to shave her head like Natalie Portman. She and her brother had had a dystopian movie fest -- _V for Vendetta_ and the _Alien_ trilogy (which Huck argued for on the basis that the "six foot creatures with acid for blood who kill on sight and are generally unpleasant" made a world pretty damned dystopian if you asked him) and _28 Days Later_ and _The Road_ and _Das Leben der Anderen_ \-- because they like that kind of thing, because they are their parents' children. And _V for Vendetta_ had been last on the list and the one that got to her the most: the one that seemed to curl up in her gut and growl and thrash and threaten bad dreams on her until she wanted to ask Huck to stick around in her room rather than go back to his own, only she didn't dare. The dreams had come and they were all dirty streets and the smell of spray paint at the back of her throat and the fear of running and the fear of stopping, stumbling over each image, choking on each torn-away thing, losing her breath with her face against the cold floor of a prison cell. She woke up with Evey's face, with Natalie's face, exploding above her own -- fireworks, spirals of light and dying shadows, cheekbones like escarpments cut from a block of wax, eyebrows like the wings of blackbirds -- she opened her eyes, she decided.

What Huck remembers, he tells her later, is that he was watching her spiralling. He thought. They were then, are now, both of them, engaged in a tentative balancing act with their own minds. Huck blames the world in general, their father blames himself, their mother finds it counterproductive to blame anything in particular since that doesn't really get a damn thing fixed. And Molly? She finds it useful to think about chaos, patterns, and balance. To put it simply (and she has to put it simply, because her brother is the poet, and he gets touchy about getting overshadowed) it's the whole thing with what goes up must come down. It's all true, every word. She danced when she was a little girl and whenever she soars, and whenever she crashes, she thinks about dancing: little pirouettes of the mind. Sometimes she used to fall, some nights she would bleed. This is just the same. Huck doesn't agree, of course. He sits at the other end of her bed the night he tells her, curled up, looking all limbs though he's all of five foot six, in skinny jeans, his eyebrows too like bird wings, like crows have swept their wings over his brow. She smiles: he's the poet; she just spirals, up and down. All she wanted to do was shave her head.

"All I wanted to do was shave my head, Huck."

He shrugs. "I know."

"You got that piercing."

"Yeah."

She sighs. "This is a girl thing, isn't it?"

His mouth shrugs this time. "Very possibly." He clears his throat and rubs his thumb over the end of his chin, and instantly looks exactly like their father, if their father was was thinner, and had a full head of thick black hair. For a moment, just a moment, she hates them both. "Sorry," he says.

The whole thing of it is, she tries to explain to her mother, that she doesn't really know how to do this girl thing. None of it makes a lot of sense to her, even though she did the requisite girly things -- the ballet and a few strokes of modern dance, the Girl Scout cookies, the phase of inexplicable love for pink -- she doesn't see why, now that she's almost a grown-up, after all, almost sixteen, there's any real reason she can't take it the other way. And anyway, Natalie Portman looked really amazing with her head shaved like that, all kinds of feminine. Plus it's not like the stuff won't grow back again. So what's the big deal? When she thinks about it a little longer she suspects that her mom maybe had Britney Spears in her head rather than Evey the Freedom Fighter. And anyway, what would it look like in the newspapers, sweetheart?

*

Do you think I'm going mad? she asks her brother. They are fifteen and sometimes they still curl up in the big bed in their parents' room and there are stories they tell, stories no one told them, stories pieced together, stories drawn up from pictures, raised like the columns underneath a colonnade, raised up like a kite in the sky. Huck takes Toby's part and Molly always did their mom's and the diaries and the letters and photographs, the little clippings from newspapers, the papers that probably shouldn't have made it out of either of their offices, they become a palimpsest -- new every time: their text, of which they are the leading historians, the most incisive journalists, the archaeologists sweating in the sun digging down to the end, the archivists, and the poets.

It was their favourite game when they were little, about seven or eight, before their father came home. It was like life during wartime, then. The rationing based around attention (from him) and information (from her), and they were just old enough to have realised that their way of living wasn't the only way of living, or even the usual way of living. Their friends didn't crave their fathers; they had them every night, they took them for granted, they even found themselves able to hate their fathers. Neither she nor her brother dared to hate Toby Ziegler, not then, in case their hate might make him disappear altogether.

So they made their own fairy stories, and he was a strange Prince Charming but he was all the same. There is one photograph of them kissing, and another of them in each other's arms, the day of the first wedding, before they were born, but not before they were thought of. Huck would get a strange look in his eyes, looking at that photo of them kissing. Sometimes, when they were younger and if that day was particularly hard, he would cry. Molly never cried. She was older, and he was the tender one, and she held him while he cried. She was good at being the big sister, by eight minutes' virtue. She isn't quite as good at letting him have his share of virtue, too.

"Do you think I'm going crazy?"

His hand is light but warm in the centre of her back, just between her shoulder blades.

"No."

It's maddening, some nights, his silence. He speaks in declaratives, in absolutes, because he's afraid to say the wrong thing; he's afraid to bend words around truths that will later be lies.

Tonight she just laughs.

"You're sure then?" she says, smiling at him. Sometimes she thinks she'll never need anyone but him: his grey eyes like the endlessness of oceans, like the peace, and the heaviness in an overcast sky. He is more in love with their father than she ever has been, and she loves him instead. His hurts ache in her, like little bruises on little bruises, purpling her heart.

Huck smiles. "I'm pretty sure. I mean, you're not pulling your hair out, just shaving it off. That's cool. And I think you'll look great. By the way." He blushes when he says this, just a little bloom across his cheeks and forehead. She smiles back at him.

"Thanks," she says.

Later, he says, "Do you think he ever had anyone else?" It's an old question, but a consistent anxiety for Huck. She has no idea why. Her answer is always the same: "No, I don't think he ever loved anyone else. I mean just look at that picture -- ", a different picture, one taken a few years before they got married again, some fundraiser for their mother's campaign for a seat she couldn't possibly lose. Even though he'd almost gone to jail, she invited him, their father, to stand in the corner and be a column of indecision, of longing, a storm cloud. In the picture their mom is smiling, laughing -- some stupid joke the guy at her elbow is telling her, Molly always thinks -- and just off to the side, watching her, he is there. Their eyes are touching, along a line of light, the line of her laughter. A smile is just breaking on his face, a tiny dawn glimmer; on hers the grin is getting wider, and deeper, the depth in her eyes, secret; a shining stone of a secret, polished up between their hands, between their two lives. It has always been clear to her, even with her spiralling head and her imperfect heart, that a lack of love was not her parents' problem, nor her brother's, nor hers.

Eventually, Huck falls asleep. His breathing is so quiet as to be almost not there at all. He curls up like a cat, a long sleek line from the base of his neck to the base of his spine. She strokes this line, over and over, and concentrates on not going mad.

And eventually, a little further along, once Molly is asleep too, they come home.

*

Her father strokes her hair, while he can. She wakes up against his hand and it is warm, like her dream, whatever she was dreaming about.

"Hello, sweetness," he says, in his voice like a draught under the door, making the tips of her cold, her fingers and toes. His fingers disappear in her hair. He looks tired; he always does. Sometimes she doesn't know whether she loves him -- the beard with the thumbprints of grey beneath the lip, the shoulders she remembers riding on as a very little girl, the warmth of his jacket just as he has taken it off -- or the idea of him: the fairytale.

"Mom says you're going in for a little drastic surgery," he says, ponderingly, like he's wondering whether she'll look the same lacking an arm or an eye, like she's a picture hanging on a wall. Only his fingers, in her hair, can she give her trust to.

"Just a little hair, dad. It'll grow back."

"Mmm," he says, non-comitally. "Sure it's not a profound political statement?"

She smiles, and turns on the bed so that she can see him better; this game she understands. Huck's knees disappear from the small of her back, where they were, and her brother makes a little noise at the back of his throat. Toby's eyes flick over to his son, then back to his daughter.

"If I said yes would that make you feel better?"

He smiles. It is still shocking, though not from unfamiliarity. The whiteness of his teeth dazzles her; she realises that the chorus of 'Mack the Knife' has begin to twist around in her head, incoherent, on endless repeat.

"I was just thinking, you know, you're fifteen, nearly sixteen now. Way I see it, almost everything you do should be a political statement."

His fingers have gone from her hair now. His thumb is stroking her brow, perfect lines, two on two, and then a little rest. It is soothing; it quietens _something_. She remembers that she is supposed to smile.

"I guess so."

He sighs, mock dramatically. "I don't know, you kids these days."

She grins at him. "I know, we're a disgrace."

He leans over, kisses her forehead in the same place his thumb was stroking. She closes her eyes. For a second the gyroscope in her brain stops whirling.

Her father never says _I love you_. It's just not one of the things he does. Nether does Huck. They use their bodies to say those things; their hands and their eyes, their way of watching, quietly, at the side of the picture, which is all they need to say. Her mother makes a point of saying _I love you_ at the end of every phonecall; she also makes a point of never letting it sound like a formula, or a foregone conclusion. The result has been that Molly feels both caught up above the dust tight in someone's arms, and always in danger of being dropped. She herself tries to strike a balance: say it when it matters. So far it has mattered in blood, in tears, and she has known that she must never say it in anger, as a threat, or a guilt-trip. She hasn't inherited their love of the eternal argument, even though she fakes it well; some things need to be saved.

Instead of those words, her father says, "You'll do just fine for me, kid."

*

Her mom waits for her, in a Starbucks near the hair salon. Molly imagines it being, for her, like the way she felt waiting for the appearance of her first (and so far only) date: checking the door on the fall of every heartbeat, wondering things that won't get answers on this side of that door opening, each new person checked and rejected as they come through that door, until. Molly hasn't been able to stop stroking her head, the fur-smoothness of the shape of her skull under the stubble, and this is her action as she pushes open the door, and the first thing she sees the blaze of her mom's hair as the sun catches it. There's a moment between the one in which Molly sees her and she sees Molly, and in it Molly sees the future: years more like this, measured out in petty arguments and boundary wars, fighting over a body they aren't sure belongs to either of them; moving away, disappearing, forgetting to call on purpose, feeling overshadowed by Huck's sense of duty, and more by Huck's sense of love and how he holds onto it, refusing to let it go, refusing to allow himself to be let go. In one moment she becomes invisible, and when she reappears, is new.

Her mother beckons her over. She's already ordered and in front of Molly's chair there is a generous measure of what her father calls Starbuck's finest coffee-with-half-an-iceberg-in-it. Molly collapses into the chair and takes a big sip. She looks up, tries to seem grateful.

Her mom smiles at her, secrets getting polished in her eyes. Molly thinks she looks proud, somehow, briefly wonders if she ought to ask if she can get a piercing, too.

"You're gonna make your dad jealous, you know," her mom says, smirking the smirk that means a girls' in-joke, which means a joke excluding her father, though Huck usually makes it in on his merits; old alliances die hard, and sometimes they arrange themselves into a triangle without even thinking about it.

"Yeah, voluntary baldness is so much sexier."

Her mom grins around the straw in her mouth; a second earlier and Molly might have made her do a spit-take, but there's still plenty of time to try again.

"Plus you look better in your O's cap."

"Also very true."

Her mom puts her own drink down, reaches out for Molly's face, strokes two cool fingers across her cheek. For once she doesn't say 'I love you'; she doesn't say anything at all. The silence, the bubble of silence they have made in the bustle of the coffee shop, is welcome. Her mother's hand soothing. She thinks of dancing, and then of stopping the dance. Today, she thinks she could choose.


End file.
